World's fastest cells race across a petri dish

A line of fetal mesenchymal bone-marrow stem cells from
Singapore are the Usain Bolt of the microbiology world, beating
dozens of competitors to take gold in a race across a petri dish.

The World Cell Race
was held at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual
meeting in Colorado, and 2011's event attracted more than 70
competitors from 50 different labs. The bone-marrow cells that took
the medal sped across the plastic at a whopping 5.2 microns per
minute. That's 0.000000194 miles per hour.

However, we're not talking about a hundred-metre sprint here.
The track was just 400 microns long, so it took just over an hour
for the winner to cross the line.The others weren't so fast, though
-- a camera was left running for 24 hours to capture the entire
race. In another deviation from human athletics, the track was
coated with a substance that gives cells traction, and each type of
cell was allowed to compete 200 times, with the fastest individual
cell chosen to represent its kin.

The cells didn't even all compete in the same geographical
location. Due to the difficulties (both logistical and political)
of transporting cells across the globe, a series of labs in Boston,
London, Heidelberg, Paris, San Francisco and Singapore
simultaneously held races for their local competitors.

The race organiser, Manuel Théry
from Institut de Recherche en Technologies et Sciences pour le
Vivant in Grenoble, told Nature News that the most important factor
was getting the cells to just move in one direction. The slower
competitors tended to go back and forth along the track.

In second place was a line of French unaltered breast epithelial
cells, while the bronze medal went to the same cell type tweaked to
reflect cell-signaling patterns observed in cancerous cells -- they
managed 3.2 and 2.7 microns per minute respectively. Each won a Nikon
camera and a medal. Britain came fourth, represented by a line
of cultured human skin cells derived from patients with a rare
genetic skin disorder, whizzing past at 2.5 microns per
minute.

A tortoise award was also handed out for the cell type that
moved most persistently without changing direction. That was won by
the United States, with a line of modified mouse embryonic
fibroblasts.

The deeper point here, of
course, is looking at how cells move. By working out the process
that cells migrate, and how to speed up and slow that down, we may
be able to find out more about what lets embryos develop, and
cancer spread. So far, it's already been noted that stem cells and
cancerous cells tend to be faster than mature and healthy
ones.

More cellular athletics are
planned for the future, including swimming and weightlifting.